EPA Tightening Noose on States’ Authority

The Environmental Protection Agency has started regulating everything – the electric industry, land and water use, and ozone rules that limit development in each community.

According to the Washington Examiner, a new Chamber of Commerce study said the EPA is stripping states of their individual authority – and money – through multiple unfunded mandates. The rules are increasing, while federal grants to help the states comply with the rules are decreasing, leaving individual states to figure out how to pay for it.

William Kovacs, the Chamber’s senior vice president for environmental and regulatory affairs, said, “EPA and the Obama administration have introduced some of the most expensive regulations in our country’s history, and then left state and local officials with the tab.”

Environmental groups are defending the EPA, and accusing business groups such as the Chamber of Commerce, and the coal industry, of “bogging down Obama’s climate rules in the courts.”

The Natural Resources Defense Council is trying to shut down the coal industry.

“The Clean Power Plan takes aim straight at one of our biggest sources of climate pollution — America’s aging and outmoded coal-fired power plants,” said the group’s president, Rhea Suh in a message to donors. “But the coal industry and their allies have mounted a massive legal assault, tying up the Clean Power Plan in federal court.”

A legal battle is indeed brewing. Washington Examiner says the Chamber of Commerce, about 30 states, and many other groups have sued the EPA over their climate plan, and arguments are set to begin on Sept. 27 in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

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